A great way to increase engagement with your organisational purpose and to demonstrate your social responsibility is by putting in place a formal volunteer program. Your employees can take time out from their day to day activities at work to give back to the community or environment in which your organisation operates. This can not only be a rewarding experience promoting wellness and connection at an individual level, but also provide a great opportunity for storytelling to your stakeholders.
Below is a summary of how to put together a volunteer program for your small business:
1. Objectives of a Volunteer Program
Connecting your program with your organisational purpose is the optimal way to ensure relevance. If this is a little tricky, putting some effort into finding causes and community activities that align with your CSR strategy or business activities really makes a difference. You could consider aligning yourself with one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
If you don’t have a strategy in place for a purposeful partnership with a relevant cause that brings value to your organisation please get in touch and we can help you.
Further considerations:
- Will volunteer activities be based on employee expertise and skills or focus on more operational work (such as volunteering at food programs, environmental clean-ups, hospital visits).
- Is your project a one-off effort or will it offer on-going support over a period of time. If so, think about how you will organise your team accordingly to ensure that the goals of the volunteer program are met.
- How much time are you allocating for each employee each month or year. Articulate this in job contracts and advertisements and stand by your promise!
- What will be your impact? How will you measure the benefit on the community or environment so you can report back to stakeholders? This is such an important factor that is often not considered within volunteer programs. For example, how many trees did your team plant, how many hungry people did they feed, how much money did they save a charity on professional services which could now be spent on addressing the core purpose of the organisation and so on.
2. Administration of program
The host organisation that your employees work for must provide the following information for compliance:
Role descriptions:
It is vital to ensure that the expectations of your volunteer host organisation and your volunteers are met. The best way to provide structure to a program is to ensure your host organisation provides role descriptions that outline the responsibilities, skills and the estimated hours needed to fulfill the project.
Work health and safety compliance:
In order to ensure the safety and rights of your employees there must be policies and procedures in place. Any volunteer program must comply with Work Health and Safety Legislation. This needs to be accessible to all participants. This includes ensuring that sufficient supervision is provided during the program as required.
3. Maximising engagement
- Before starting make sure your team are all on board with the program objectives, enthusiastic and happy to positively contribute to the project.
- Hold a briefing session before the start of the program, share stories from the host organisation that demonstrates the impact your volunteers will be having by giving up their precious time.
- Never tell your employees to ‘make up time’ or expect that they should work extra hours to cover the time spent on the program.
- Ask program participants to take photos and videos of their experiences to post on social media and include in other communication. Always check with the host organisation beforehand!
4. Program storytelling
Ask your team members to write a blog post, contribute to social media posts or run an internal lunchtime show and tell about their experience. Share your content with the host organisation for cross promotion and if you have an amazing story to tell consider a purpose-driven PR strategy. If you’d like to discuss how to create a purpose-driven volunteer program that generates impact stories please get in touch!
Why Beekeeping is Awesome!
In the home office garden of Why Comms are two honey beekeeping hives. A couple of weeks ago I set up a hobby business Curly Honey selling local, raw, pure honey in the Northern Beaches Sydney. The process of setting up the hives, managing the bees then extracting, bottling and labelling 23 jars of liquid nectar was incredibly satisfying.
For the past six months beekeeping has given me so much joy, ticking every box below:
It’s the hobby that keeps on giving! Check out some simple tips on how your business can be more sustainable here.
Small business guide to going green
2019 was the second warmest year on record and the end of the warmest decade (2010- 2019) ever recorded. Carbon dioxide (CO2) levels and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere rose to new records in 2019.
If you are a small business, it’s pretty easy to put in place a simple sustainability policy that will actually save you money and not cost the Earth.
Here are just a few ideas to get started with your move towards a Greener environment, that will benefit your team, be a great incentive for new recruits and encourage environmentally conscious customers to choose you over competitors.
To take things to the next level, you need to start to measure and reduce your carbon footprint as a business. This can get more complicated, depending on your industry however here are a few starting points:
If you’d like to take control of your environmental footprint, Why Communications can help you get started with ideas and create a storytelling strategy for your stakeholders. Get in touch for more information!
Mental Health: I am United
The impact of Covid 19 is so much more than a physical health crisis. It will continue to put a strain on the mental wellbeing of individuals and communities for years to come, especially health workers, managers of health facilities, people who are looking after children, older adults, people in isolation, those who have lost loved ones and members of the public at a more general level.
Why Communications is proud to be supporting The United Project a charitable foundation uniting the world’s workplaces to improve mental health & prevent suicides. The United Project is set on reversing mental illness by:
As part of our Pledge 1% commitment, and intention to support the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, Why Comms will be donating on-going pro-bono hours to run the ambassador program for The United Project. The ambassador program has public profile individuals on board that include a Miss Universe Australia model, a singer, elite Olympians and a Paralymic competitor. Their role is to support The United Project to advocate for positive mental health, raise awareness of related issues and support programs such as our gratitude points.
We are proud to be United.
Guide to developing an impactful volunteer program
A great way to increase engagement with your organisational purpose and to demonstrate your social responsibility is by putting in place a formal volunteer program. Your employees can take time out from their day to day activities at work to give back to the community or environment in which your organisation operates. This can not only be a rewarding experience promoting wellness and connection at an individual level, but also provide a great opportunity for storytelling to your stakeholders.
Below is a summary of how to put together a volunteer program for your small business:
1. Objectives of a Volunteer Program
Connecting your program with your organisational purpose is the optimal way to ensure relevance. If this is a little tricky, putting some effort into finding causes and community activities that align with your CSR strategy or business activities really makes a difference. You could consider aligning yourself with one of the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
If you don’t have a strategy in place for a purposeful partnership with a relevant cause that brings value to your organisation please get in touch and we can help you.
Further considerations:
2. Administration of program
The host organisation that your employees work for must provide the following information for compliance:
Role descriptions:
It is vital to ensure that the expectations of your volunteer host organisation and your volunteers are met. The best way to provide structure to a program is to ensure your host organisation provides role descriptions that outline the responsibilities, skills and the estimated hours needed to fulfill the project.
Work health and safety compliance:
In order to ensure the safety and rights of your employees there must be policies and procedures in place. Any volunteer program must comply with Work Health and Safety Legislation. This needs to be accessible to all participants. This includes ensuring that sufficient supervision is provided during the program as required.
3. Maximising engagement
4. Program storytelling
Ask your team members to write a blog post, contribute to social media posts or run an internal lunchtime show and tell about their experience. Share your content with the host organisation for cross promotion and if you have an amazing story to tell consider a purpose-driven PR strategy. If you’d like to discuss how to create a purpose-driven volunteer program that generates impact stories please get in touch!
Free Storytelling Tool
Every business has a story to tell! Not sure what this means? A good start is to consider what the purpose of your business is, why do you exist and what drives you and your team.
To help you get started we have provided a tool that you can download below for free.
Why Comms would love to help you to develop strategies to engage with your audience and make positive change for the community and/or environment. Please get in touch and see how we can help bring your story to life.
Why Communications Joins Pledge 1%
We are pleased to announce that Why Communications has joined the Pledge 1%, a global movement creating new normal where companies of all sizes integrate giving back into their culture and values.
Pledge 1% empowers companies to donate 1% of product, 1% of equity, 1% of profit or 1% of employee time to causes of their choice.
Thousands of companies around the world have taken the Pledge and shared their intent to give back through their company.
Why Communications is excited to join Pledge 1%’s network of founders, entrepreneurs and companies around the globe that have committed to giving back.
We pledge 5% of our time towards pro-bono social and environmental good, partnering with organisations that are aligned with the United Nation’s sustainable development goals.
We also make additional charitable donations to organisations that tackle the world’s biggest problems.
We carbon offset all our business travel.
For more information about Pledge 1%, visit www.pledge1percent.org.
Why supporting suicide prevention
Amos Amazes
Superstar comedian, Stephen K Amos’ personal brand has been fundamentally built upon his own social background. As a gay man with heritage in Nigeria, many years on the International comedy circuit has built the Londoner a reputation of being a global ambassador for social acceptance and inclusion, a role model to so many people.
After the tragic death of his twin sister in a palliative care home in 2018, Amos hit rock bottom, like so many other grieving families. Digging deep to cope with his own emotional pain, Amos has been inspired by a deeper purpose to support and give back to palliative care homes all over the world. Amos is now on a mission to help terminally ill people and their families.
During his Adelaide Fringe tour Amos raised over $20,000 for the Mary Potters Foundation. At the Enmore Theatre in Sydney I had the pleasure of watching the performance on 4th May. All it took was a humble request during the show to ask fans to donate a few dollars on their way out to raise funds for Bear Cottage in Manly. Seeing Amos’ smiling face out in the foyer rattling his donation bucket (and in the local pub later) was an absolute treat!
The generosity of Amos to match the audience donations was the final put this humble and inspiring man on my Purpose Pedestal. Keep smiling Stephen 🙂